Review of the Mac OSX Snow Leopard Review

Hmmm. The heavily featured "review" of Snow Leopard by Jason Parker from CNET on this site is a sort of cursory glance at some features which Apple have implemented. But, like Nokia's answer to the iPhone, the review checks all the boxes but misses the point. I don't have the time or the space to answer everything that came up but let's have a quick go at pulling apart the conclusion shall we?

"Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is not a complete system overhaul, but is instead a refinement of the current Leopard OS — some have gone so far as to call it a 'service pack'."
The underlying technologies, having been completely rewritten, is precisely a complete system overhaul. By making this statement twice (I think the review started with much the same comment) you are missing out on what exactly Apple have done here.

"We think the interface tweaks to Exposé, Stacks, the Finder, Mail and iCal make Snow Leopard more than just a service pack and worthy of the £25 upgrade price."
Again you are looking at the surface, glossy, stuff. Yes I know you think that that is what the public are going to be looking at but you are ignoring what has actually happened. It is easy for Microsoft fanbois to try and claim that this is, in fact, a service pack because they don't actually know what is going on and by ignoring all the truly cool stuff they can box it into that corner pretty easily. The fact that the reviewer bought it up at all was to plant that very seed into the minds of the people reading the article.

"We don't like the fact that PowerPC users are unable to use Snow Leopard, but we understand that after three years with Intel, Apple is making a decision to continue moving forward with this technology."
I am bemused by this argument and have read it in many other places as a criticism of Snow Leopard. Put it this way, if you haven't bought a new machine in 3 and a half years then you are not really an Apple customer are you? The people who purchased powerPC machines - October 2005 was the date of last PowerPC machine made by Apple - got a machine that did what it said it did. If you had based your workflow around that machine then it will still be working now. By releasing Snow Leopard they don't magically stop working - no one is forcing you to upgrade. The point being is that with the release of Snow Leopard many of the optimizations that are in place aren't relevant to the PowerPC anyway, even if they could be implemented. By the way - who exactly is this "we" you refer to?

"The largest of the feature enhancements are probably reason enough for Intel Mac users to spend the money on Snow Leopard. Added enhancements such as video, audio and screen recording in QuickTime X were once only available to those who purchased QuickTime Pro (which cost about the same as this system upgrade)."
Nah, Apple are still bundling Quicktime Professional in the box as well, they being acutely aware that what they have put into Quicktime X is useful to mom and dad to do stuff quickly but by no means sufficient for the pro.

"But the killer feature addition for Snow Leopard could be Exchange support out of the box — not even Windows 7 comes with Exchange support without buying Microsoft Office."
Cosmetically, yes, practically no. In the reviews I have read so far it is not quite as straight forward to integrate as Apple would have you believe - Walt Mossberg had to get his people talk to Apple's people to get it to work at all - and as he points out in his review - not many people have Walt's pull at Apple. This unfortunately puts the ball back into the techy cabal in your company to do some work from their end. Unlikely I fear. But Apple will continue to make this part better given time and maybe, just maybe, it will force MS to include some of this integration on their OS without forcing you to buy versions of office.

"Overall, we think that Snow Leopard delivered almost everything Apple says it set out to do: it refined and enhanced Leopard to make it easier to use."
Again, damning with faint praise. Almost. But hey, if we ignore the important stuff then we can reach the following conclusion:

"Although the system performs well in everyday use, many of our tests indicate it's slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more intensive application processes. Still, we highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Exchange support."
Let me see, the bits you so carefully ignored in the review, like OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch are now available in an OS for the developers to produce software for. Until the OS is in people's hands these features are not going to ship in a product. So these tests you have done are with software that doesn't actually use any of the hard core features you are slagging off here. Using iTunes is a great idea to test the features such as encoding and the like, but as it is the same iTunes that has been shipping for a while now maybe it would have been worth waiting for the 9th of September and the release of iTunes 9 to see if we get the significant speed increases Apple promised as I suspect that this is where Apple will start to ship Snow Leopard optimized versions of their code. I hope you will revisit some of the benchmarks when you actually have some software that will fully utilize the optimizations put in place here.